It's less so about the method and more about how it is written. You can't ignore the balloon symbolism, it literally is the only thing we are given. That isn't acceptable, a reader is not supposed to jump through hoops to try to understand what is under the symbolism. That is the writer's job.

If you start accepting guides that are literally nothing but symbolism, you start filling the tips and tricks section with stuff like "got trouble concentrating??? Just imagine you are in photoshop and there's noise in your layer and you delete the layer and you're done!", which is way too personal and not useful. If you want to be a useful GAT member, you need to keep an eye out for stuff like this and push the writers to reconsider their message.

The THE SUBCONCIOUS ochinchin occultists frt.sys (except Roswell because he doesn't want to be a part of it)

My beef was with your saying that it was pure symbolism, which it's not. I'll recant my approval until this is written in a way that doesn't use specific items to refer to sending thoughts to your tulpa spatially, I guess.

You gotta work on your delivery dude, is there a reason you're so prickly or are you completely unaware of how you come off?

It is totally approvable in its current state. I don't look for symbolism when approving stuff. Of course I wouldn't approve an egregious case. Unless it was egregious in a good way.

I don't understand the "physical part of the brain" bit. That makes no sense with "imagine a balloon" bit as well. I am aware of encapsulating thought bubbles as an important symbolic technique, and the balloon method is a specific case of this, but the imagination is not spatially relevant to a physical part of the brain. The main problem here is how do you hold a balloon that is superimposed on your skull?

Stevie Wrote:My beef was with your saying that it was pure symbolism, which it's not.

Considering that the method that is written in the guide currently is "imagine a balloon that represents a thought and let the balloon float up to your tulpa", that is symbolism. Pure symbolism, in fact. There always is an idea behind the symbolism (otherwise it wouldn't work!), but if that idea isn't properly written and only the symbolism exists, the guide has been made too personal to be of use to a wider audience than like, potentially just yourself. Symbolism is something that your mind would connect to that idea possibly even without you fully realizing that it's doing it. But if someone else doesn't connect that symbolism to the same idea and you never explain what it is, you have completely lost the reader. And as symbolism is very personal... Well, I hope you see the issue here?

Again, a reader's job is not to try to dig for a meaning in a guide. That is the writer's job to write it if they want to actually make something helpful and your job as a GAT member to point them in that direction. I hope you keep that in mind as you review these.

tulpa001 Wrote:I don't look for symbolism when approving stuff.

Then please resign from the guide approval team if you are not going to uphold the standards. You are just hurting the writers by giving out mixed messages and the others who are trying to make sure that the guides and tips that are approved aren't just personal symbolism bits. If you approve this, you would literally have to approve every other guide of pure symbolism that is submitted, as long as it's written in understandable English. That would be the end of GAT, because then the approved sections would be pure garbage where you have to dig deep to find anything useful, just like they used to be when we just had one board for guides and all the good bits were mixed with crap. A lot of crap. You know, the reason GAT was created in the first place, to filter the personal and the useless stuff from the good stuff. We wouldn't be needed if we're just going to return to that.

The THE SUBCONCIOUS ochinchin occultists frt.sys (except Roswell because he doesn't want to be a part of it)

The only problem with symbolism here is that it's vague enough to be stated other ways, not that it's useless. It's a conduit for focusing thoughts on your tulpa, and for expecting your tulpa to be receiving them. So the question is whether this concept has been submitted/approved before, or if it's different enough to be added to the collection. If you guys all approve of the concept but "not the symbolism", then (as I'd personally have recommended) alternative symbolisms utilizing the same general concept should be provided (added). Not just a balloon, because that's personal symbolic preference, but other methods of "delivering" thoughts to your tulpa, or ways for them to receive those thoughts. Do that so that the overarching concept is clearer and less reliant on the specific symbolism of balloons.

For the approvers, once that's done, it's up to you to decide whether the overarching concept is detailed in a way that people could benefit from it after skimming other guides on communicating with tulpas, or if the concept has already been clearly established in perhaps other symbolisms (like a computer interface or writing notes or some such).

Alright, we good? No need to fight over it. Your argument (Tulpa and Sands) is one path you could go down in this situation, but hey, mine's another more productive one. But maybe my personal perspective was just unique and not necessarily a "right" answer anyone could've come to, I don't know, because Sands' points are ones - I just feel like this could've gone a more productive direction is all.

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.
Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.
My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us stuff.

The fundamentals of this guide are based on things which I feel are much too abstract.
You are instructed to let go of the balloon and let it fly upwards to where your tulpa is located in your brain. This is quite a counter-intuitive concept here, suggesting that your tulpa does in fact reside in a specific, physical area of your brain. It doesn't, and unless you've already come to associate a particular area of your head with your tulpa, this part of the symbolism won't be very significant to you.
What's more, if the balloon traveling upwards to a specific area in your head where your tulpa is is important, then you would also have to have associated a specific part of your brain with you/your wonderland or something, right? Otherwise, it would be going up towards your tulpa, from a non-specific location. If you're going for symbolism based on symbolic, physical travel throughout your brain, you're missing half of that equation, if you don't have a firm association with where you are starting.
Moreover, does that mean your tulpa has to be located somewhere in your brain higher up than where you are located? Otherwise the balloon would be going in the wrong direction.

I'm being pedantic here to show that the symbolism that this guide is based on does not appear to be particularly well thought out, and that a person following this guide would probably have to have pretty specific associations to these concepts (that are in-line with your own) for it to be useful to them. You could expand the guide to explain the general concept you're going for—really explain what you're trying to achieve with the symbolism—and perhaps detail multiple different ways that the reader can incorporate your method into their own symbolic associations. A paper airplane could be used instead of a balloon, so that it doesn't have to travel upwards. Something could be thrown over a wall, if the reader has chosen to imagine a wall as a symbolic representation of their disconnectedness from their tulpa. Maybe it would be just as helpful to someone for them to merely imagine giving their tulpa a note or something, containing the idea. Maybe even just hand them the balloon. If you are both present in your wonderland for this, it wouldn't require having associated you/your tulpa with specific locations in your brain, which a lot of people (dare I say most) have not.
Those were just a few random examples off the top of my head. The idea is that you should be explaining it in such a way that the reader can choose their own symbolism that works for them, and hopefully giving them a few different examples to help solidify the concept, or spark their creativity.

In my opinion, the best guides that involve symbolism are ones which take an idea—in this case, representing the transmission of a thought through a physical medium, through space—explain what the underlying concept is to the idea, and in essence, help the reader to build their own symbolic method. This way, you do not presuppose the reader's own symbolic associations and constructs; you are merely proposing an idea that they can use with their own "tools", so to speak. If the guide is based too heavily on a single symbolic idea, it will be helpful to only a small subset of readers, whose ideas of symbolism match your own. Symbolism is a very subjective thing, and it is only helpful if the symbolism being used is something that resonates with the user.

"If this can be avoided, it should. If it can't, then it would be better if it could be. If it happened and you're thinking back to it, try and think back further. Try not to avoid it with your mind. If any of this is possible, it may be helpful. If not, it won't be."

Luminesce Wrote:The only problem with symbolism here is that it's vague enough to be stated other ways, not that it's useless.

True that symbolism is not useless. However, approving guides that are just symbolism will end up creating a board full of useless stuff, due to their personal nature. But as symbolism can be useful, that's why there is a section dedicated to submissions that were disapproved due to symbolism, so they can still be found easily without muddying up the other boards in case someone wants to browse through them all like that.

Luminesce Wrote:If you guys all approve of the concept but "not the symbolism", then (as I'd personally have recommended) alternative symbolisms utilizing the same general concept should be provided (added). Not just a balloon, because that's personal symbolic preference, but other methods of "delivering" thoughts to your tulpa, or ways for them to receive those thoughts. Do that so that the overarching concept is clearer and less reliant on the specific symbolism of balloons.

This, however, is not the way. It's not about this particular piece of symbolism – though as we can see, Kiahdaj disagrees with the balloon already and as this guide is written, it obviously wouldn't work for him – but symbolism in general. It doesn't matter if you write five hundred different symbolism methods if you never state the original idea in a non-symbolic form. People have to understand the idea behind it, be offered a way to do it without symbolism but symbolism can always be suggested as an extra. That way, if people feel like they can't do it without symbolism, they could try out someone else's idea. Or create their own, once they know they idea behind it. To Kiahdaj, a paper plane made perfect sense, but a balloon didn't. This is the problem behind symbolism only submissions.

tulpa001 Wrote:Thank you Sands, but I think I will politely decline your polite request. Unless you can produce the missing standards document you refer to.

Symbolism and approvals have been talked about in greater detail here, and the common consensus between GAT was that tulpa guides can be written without symbolism and thus that is preferred due to the extremely personal nature of them.

edit: autocorrect destroyed my link help

The THE SUBCONCIOUS ochinchin occultists frt.sys (except Roswell because he doesn't want to be a part of it)

I'm probably too used to interpreting symbolism for its non-symbolic meaning I guess. Stating it in different ways helps me put together exactly what they're getting at. But I trust you to know better how people learn because you've been doing this for quite a while. That's basically exactly why I'm not part of GAT, I'd rather what I have to offer be considered extra help than responsibility. In some way I can't always be sure of what I'm saying's truth when it's subjective and being taken so seriously by others, so better to leave it to people who can.

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.
Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.
My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us stuff.

Those of us who have been around longer will understand concepts newbies won't, because we've most likely felt/done them ourselves or at the very least heard someone else propose the idea. But we have to also make sure they're understandable to a wider audience, even a complete outsider with no previous experience of anything like this.

Symbolism can of course be added to a guide and it might help some understand the idea even better, but first you have to explain how to do it without. If it's about symbolism or no symbolism, the method with no symbolism will be understandable to more people than the symbolism method. But nothing stops you from having both of them, the best of both worlds.

The THE SUBCONCIOUS ochinchin occultists frt.sys (except Roswell because he doesn't want to be a part of it)